Stoned

Even at my advancing age, it still amazes me, the things I didn’t know I didn’t know. For example, I was flicking through one of my son’s science mags and fell upon an article about semi-precious stones and discovered that amethysts are named from the Greek, “a” meaning not and “methuskein” meaning to intoxicate in the belief that if you drank wine from an amethyst goblet you wouldn’t get drunk.

Which tells us that the ancient Greeks weren’t quite as smart as we’ve been led to believe. First, it would have been self-evidently untrue when the first person slid under the table. Either that or they woke up the next morning with a stonking headache and raging thirst and no memory of whether it had worked or not and simply kept on repeating the experiment.

Second, what is the point of drinking wine if it isn’t to make you giddy?